The way phone manufacturers manage to make phones last an entire day on a fully charged battery is not by making better batteries, but by closely managing and restricting battery usage. Sensors and radios are either shut down or put in a low-power (a.k.a. standby) state as soon as the user isn’t actively using them, and apps that require running in the background are either recommended to or outright forced to shut down depending on the manufacturer’s policies. Even so, certain fancy phone models you can buy today don’t even last a full day under “normal” use.

Crowdsourcing is definitely a very promising avenue for scientific research, and there already are plenty of ways phones can be used in which users provide sporadic input throughout the day. But it will probably be a while longer before we can expect widespread use of phone apps that run in the background all day long like the earthquake sensing app described.